Extreme heat affects Indian women more than men; analysis finds spike in deaths due to high heat since 2005

A new study has revealed a troubling gender disparity in India when it comes to coping with extreme heat. Women, according to the analysis, are significantly more vulnerable to extreme temperature conditions compared to men.

Since 2005, data shows a concerning rise in heat-related deaths among women in India, said the analysis published in Significance Magazine, a journal by Royal Statistical Society.

“We find through descriptive statistical analysis that publicly available data for India shows that females exhibit a heightened susceptibility to extreme temperature conditions (specifically heat) compared to males,” Ramit Debnath, university assistant professor and an academic director at the University of Cambridge, and one of the authors, told Down To Earth.

Debnath and his colleagues initiated the analysis to see if women in India face a higher risk of mortality from extreme temperatures in India. But the country lacks granular (level of detail) and high quality national data on temperature related health and healthcare data.

This, according to the team, is primarily because there is no standardised methodology to report mortality and morbidity (illness) due to temperature change.

So, the team relied on 30 years of extreme-temperature-related mortality data to find answers and identify gaps.

They extracted mortality and population data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD), the largest and most comprehensive effort to quantify health loss across 204 countries, territories and sub-national locations and over time.

The authors point out that while the GBD database provides annual estimates for gender-specific temperature-related mortality rates from 1950 to 2019 in India, the data still lacks granularity.

They also collected data on India’s daily temperature data (mean, maximum and minimum) from 1990-2019 recorded by India Meteorological Department (IMD).

Their analysis showed that men showed a gradual decline in deaths with certain spikes linked to temperature, whereas for women, it showed a gradual increase from 2005.

The percentage relative change in mortality rates decreased by 23.11 per cent for men from 2000 to 2010, and 18.7 per cent from 2010 to 2019.

For women, the percentage change in mortality rate increased by 4.63 per cent in 2000 to 2010 and 9.84 per cent between 2010 and 2019.

Debnath said the team could not identify the reason behind the gradual increase in temperature-related fatalities in women. “But an intuitive reason is increased reporting of female mortality in India,” he said.

The decrease is male temperature-related deaths could be possibly explained by advances in public healthcare infrastructure, socioeconomic upliftment and increased access to cooling and heating in the country. 

The analysis suggested women exhibit a heightened susceptibility to extreme temperature conditions (specifically heat) compared to men.

The team also compared studies on mortality linked to temperature across the world. The Global North, they point out, shows stronger evidence on women being at higher risk of weather-related mortality. No study has concluded the opposite.

As for the Global South, among the 16 studies that were a part of the analysis, seven studies conclude women are at high risk, six conclude the opposite and three declare no significant difference between the genders.

Among the 16 studies, four were from India. Of them, three found that women face a higher risk and one reported the opposite. Current studies in the Global South present conflicting views on gender-specific mortality rates from temperature changes, the researchers noted in the paper.

Further, most evidence was gathered from sectors like industry, agriculture, or informal daily wage labourers. The authors found no data on the population that mostly stays indoors. In countries like India, women spend 54 per cent more time indoors than men.

Women in the Global South are especially at risk due to rigid cultural norms and societal expectations, which limit their ability to respond and cope effectively to extreme temperature risks.

“Staying indoors add a higher vulnerability factor due to poor built environment conditions like lack of ventilation and cooling agencies, Debnath highlighted.

However, he added, that analysis could not conclude if women staying indoors put women at higher risk of heat stress.

The lack of high quality national data also has impeded the team’s understanding of whether Indian women could be at a higher risk due to socioeconomic challenges or physiological conditions. This is the data equity gap that we are raising in this paper, the author explained.

The analysis provides preliminary insights but could not provide a causal inference on whether women are more susceptible to heat stress.

Insufficient data granularity in both time and space hindered a more detailed analysis. The team called for optimal datasets with adequate resolution to capture volatile changes in mortality and extreme temperature conditions.

The available mortality data at an annual scale, the team noted, fails to factor in how fluctuations in temperature immediately affects mortality. It also does not reflect how deaths might be affected by long-term factors such as advances in healthcare or changes in population demographics.

Climate Change India